Jeff Heinz, a 2007 Ph.D. graduate of our program and now Professor of Linguistics at the University of Delaware, was awarded the LSA’s Early Career Award at January’s LSA Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. This award recognizes scholars who earned their Ph.D. in the past ten years and have made “outstanding contributions to the field of linguistics.” Here is the LSA’s citation of Jeff:
“Citation: For contributions leading to a new computational science of inference and learning as applied to language. Jeffrey Heinz has shown that all phonological generalizations in the world’s languages are computationally simple, belonging to a small group of distinct sub-regular classes within the Chomsky hierarchy. This deep result, which ensures that phonological generalizations are efficiently computable and learnable, could only be obtained through a remarkable synthesis of mathematical linguistics, computational formalisms, and linguistic theory. These linguistic insights can benefit practical problems in artificial intelligence and robotics. Dr. Heinz has published widely in linguistics and beyond, including Science, and already has an outstanding record of training successful young scholars.”
Congratulations, Jeff!!
http://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2016/11/15/lsa-members-receive-awards-annual-meeting